Object-based storage vendor Cleversafe today announced the availability of a storage system that can house up to 10 exabytes (that’s 1 billion gigabytes) of data in a single pool of capacity.

To put a storage system of that size in perspective, 1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte, and a terabyte of storage can hold about 300 hours of video. Cleversafe’s new storage system could hold 1 million times as much data as that.

It would require 4.5 million 3.5TB hard drives to build the 10-exabyte storage system, Cleversafe said. Today’s 3TB hard drives can cost as little as $150, but a storage system the size of Cleversafe’s would still cost $705 million for the spinning disks alone.

Cleversafe said it created the design for a 10-exabyte data storage system to address customers’ need to capitalize on the intelligence gained through big data analytics, which require larger and larger data stores for unstructured data.

Cleversafe, a privately-held company founded in 2004, is well funded; it has received more than $31 million in venture money, including money from In-Q-Tel, a branch of the CIA that invests in startups.